Mollom
Mollom.com website redesign (Woot!)
We're proud to present a new design for the Mollom.com website.
We first launched the Mollom.com site in 2007. For more than four years, Mollom.com was using the same design. As we grew Mollom, we wanted to address some of the issues that we've been stewing over since our original design. We have been planning to redesign the site for over a year now but work on the Mollom web service and developing new Mollom products have always had a higher priority so we haven't found the time to complete the new design until now.
The old Mollom.com design that we used from 2007 to early 2012.
The new design is the first step in our plans to reorganize the website. We still have updates to make to the content of some pages, for example. Already, we think the new design is a fresh new change that improves usability.
Take a look at the new mollom.com, we hope you like it!
The new Mollom.com website design.
Mollom 2011 retrospective
2011 was another excellent year for Mollom. We ended the year having blocked 630 million spam messages, up from 352 million spam messages blocked in 2010 -- and that doesn't even count some of our largest customers like Netlog and other large social networks. And, as in 2010, we ended 2011 with a spam classification efficiency of 99.95%, meaning that only 5 in 10,000 spam messages were not caught by Mollom.
The number of active sites protected by Mollom grew from 28,000 at the end of 2010 to almost 45,000 at the end of 2011. Revenues grew by more than 50% with virtually no sales or marketing efforts.
Almost the entire Mollom team in the Mollom office in Ghent: sun, Ben, Cedric, Thomas, Johan and Vicky. Missing in the picture are Keith and Dries.
All our revenue is invested back into the company. In 2011, we used those funds to grow our team and to fund development on an entirely new product, which may end up rebooting or repositioning Mollom altogether.
Specifically, we have been worked hard on what will be a "hosted comment moderation interface". That interface will provide an optimized moderation environment that will make it easier to moderate multiple websites, either as an individual or as part of a team of moderators. To do so we introduced a new backend with a REST-based API to replace our original XML-RPC API, we rewrote the Mollom module for Drupal, and started to change our website.
We also faced some new challenges in 2011 -- our support requests increased substantially, mostly due to the variety of sites that are now using Mollom. Based on many of these user requests, we tweaked our classifier performance, which resulted in a dramatic decrease in how often Mollom presents a CAPTCHA challenge, and in doing so, solved a number of real-world issues our clients were having with Mollom performance. Rolling out changes without impacting our up-time statistics was no small challenge -- every change we made on the backend has to be weighed against the impact it has on the effectiveness and responsiveness of Mollom on the client side.
2012 may also bring us some additional competition -- some of the world's best venture capitalists invested $8 million in a company called Impermium. Investments like this validate our belief that the social web needs good anti-spam filtering solutions. Impermium is still building its first product but will definitely be a company to watch.
Regardless of what happens in the social web spam market, we'll be busy in 2012. The first half of 2012, you'll notice some new things popping up on Mollom. Our primary goal for 2012 will be to make the "hosted comment moderation interface" available commercially and to refresh our website. Along with launching a new product, we plan to ramp up our sales and marketing efforts. It is time to do so now the Mollom technology has matured after years of intensive investment. We've also got additional work to do to continue to improve accuracy, maintain our high uptime statistics, and work with other open source developers on improvements to Mollom clients for non-Drupal systems.
In short, 2011 was a great year for Mollom. We're happy doing what we do, and we feel that we're helping to make the web a slightly better place. We wouldn't have made it this far without you -- our customers, users and friends. Without you, we wouldn't be a company at all. Thank you for 2011! We're looking forward to sharing a great 2012 with you.
Half a billion spam attempts blocked
We've just reached another huge milestones at Mollom: we blocked our 500,000,000th spam message!
Furthermore, Mollom is currently protecting close to 50,000 active websites, that is a 75% increase since the beginning of the year 8 months ago.
It's sad that our websites get bombarded by idiots. But the fact that Mollom blocked half a billion of their attempts, actually makes me feel a lot better!
Screenshot of the scorecard section on Molom.com.
New features for the Mollom module for Drupal
We have just released new versions of the Mollom module for Drupal 6 and Drupal 7. In addition to various bug fixes, as well as usability and API improvements, we have included two new end-user features. First, we've provided the ability to control the strictness of the text analysis. This allows you to control how aggressively Mollom should show CAPTCHAs and block spam. Second, we ported the profanity checking from the Drupal 7 version of the Mollom module to the Drupal 6 version. This means that you will be able to choose to use Mollom to block obscene language in addition to spam. Progress!
Hosted moderation interface: call for testers
We're about to launch a new add-on product in private beta at Mollom. That new product is effectively a "hosted moderation interface". Our goals are to:
- Provide an optimized and intelligent moderation interface -- sort and bulk moderate comments by spam score, profanity content and more.
- Make it easier to moderate multiple websites -- moderate all your sites from a single, unified moderation interface.
- Make it easier to support moderation teams -- create moderation teams, define their workflows and track the performance of individual team members.
- Provide moderation as a service -- seamlessly outsource the moderation of your site fully or partially to a dedicated team.
The product is a work in progress, but we believe we'll soon be able to accept a limited number of private beta test users. If you're interested in being an early beta tester, sign up here or leave a comment on this post.
Mollom's highly-scalable backend infrastructure reviewed
High Scalability, a site dedicated to describing and cataloging successful, highly-scalable, websites, has recently posted a detailed review of Mollom's highly-scalable backend infrastructure.
As a web service protecting close to 40,000 websites, and handling about 100 requests per second, Mollom certainly qualifies as a site with much traffic. Currently, Mollom finds and prevents about half a million spam posts per day, and does a single spam check quickly, with low latency. Every feature we add to Mollom is carefully analyzed for its impact on speed. Personally, I can't wait to see Mollom grow even larger so that our scalability challenges become even more interesting.
The article, written from a series of interviews with Ben and Johan from the Mollom team and then interspersed with the author's own experiences with installing and using the service for himself, is incredibly detailed. It accurately describes much of Mollom's history, the challenges that we faced early on, and how those challenges were overcome. All in all, it provides a great look behind the scenes of the Mollom service. Thanks for the profile, HighScalability!
Mollom 2010 retrospective
After my my 2010 retrospective on Drupal and my 2010 retrospective on Acquia, it is time to reflect on Mollom.
2010 was a good year for Mollom. We ended the year with 352 million spam messages blocked since our start in 2008. The number of spam messages Mollom blocked grew by 35% compared to 2009; 190 million spam messages were blocked in 2010, not counting our work for Netlog. Further, we ended 2010 with a spam classification efficiency of 99.95%. This means that only 5 in 10,000 spam messages were not caught by Mollom, an improvement over our 2009 efficiency rate that should be noticeable to our users.
The number of active sites protected by Mollom grew from 15,000 at the end of 2009, to almost 28,000 at the end of 2010. The number of paying customers doubled. In my 2009 Mollom retrospective, I wrote about how we were able to steer Mollom to profitability. That was a big win, because we're bootstrapping Mollom and it proves our business model works. In 2010, all profits were used to improve the service.
For example, we've made a lot of improvements to the Mollom module for Drupal. Among the most important include the ability to retain spam instead of discarding it, better spam protection for user registration, honeypot support, blacklist support, a refactored internal API with Webform integration as a result, profanity support, usability improvements, and more. We also ported the Mollom module to Drupal 7 -- and it's already used by thousands of Drupal Gardens sites.
We also used our profits to extend the backend team with two part-time engineers to give the Mollom backend a massive overhaul and to improve our operations. The new backend is not visible to our users, but it supports our growth and acts as the foundation of a number of new features and products that we hope to launch in 2011.
We also created more sophisticated tracking metrics like the average lifetime value of our paying customers. For example, the average customer lifetime for a Mollom Plus customer, averaged over the past 12 months, is 21.6 months. This translates to a monthly churn rate of 4.6% and an annual renewal rate of 57% -- calculated as (1-0.046)12. While that isn't bad for a company in our stage, it is something we want to improve in 2011.
Content on the web is growing exponentially. Most of it is spam or otherwise undesired content meaning Mollom has the potential to become 'the garbage collector of the web'. It is rewarding to know we blocked 190 million spam comments in 2010, but there is so much more we could do. I'd love for Mollom to get even more reach in 2011.
Our primary goal for 2011 is to build the best spam filtering and moderation tools available. Both by improving the user experience of our existing tools, but also by launching several new products and features. The bottom line is that many organizations ponder how to manage user engagement more efficiently, and we believe that over time, Mollom can be a big part of the answer.
If you have concrete ideas on how we could improve Mollom, we'd love to hear from you in the comments. All things combined, 2010 was a great year for Mollom. We're stronger, better and bigger than in 2009, and we've created a great foundation for 2011.
